From the start the euro was a banking crisis waiting to happen. One trigger for the crisis was Greece and the discovery that the PIIGS were pushing up yields, as detailed earlier. The other trigger was a series of events that happened, just as we saw in the United States in 2008, deep within the banking system itself and that centered upon the use of government bonds as repo collateral for funding banks. Once again, what is portrayed as a public-sector crisis is, at its core, an almost entirely private-sector (banking) problem.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 232